This course will seek to characterize melancholia from different perspectives, as a pathology that describes an “abnormal” mourning on the one hand, or as a way to define subjectivity as such on the other: subjectivity that defines itself through incorporating the other that remains other. Melancholia will be imagined as a way to describe an individual sensibility as well as a collective-generational sensibility – or rather as a sensibility that exists from time immemorial.

We will read thinkers and writers who made melancholia into a crucial issue in their writing in different and surprising ways – from Freud and Klein, Kristeva, Derrida, Barthes, Duras, Daliah Rabikovitch, Yehudith Handel up to Hannah Arendt who sought from a certain moment onwards to overcome the melancholic pleasure principle.